Just Under the Clouds by Melissa Sarno

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for an early review copy of Just Under the Clouds by Melissa Sarno, which will publish June 5, 2018. All thoughts are my own.

#young readers (ages 8-12)
Writing: 4.5 Characters: 5 Plot: 4.5

This is one of those books that opens your eyes to a completely fresh perspective. Cora is a 12-year-old girl who is technically homeless. Along with her mother and sister, she moves from placement to placement in South Brooklyn. Some placements are better than others, and some almost begin to feel like home, but all are temporary and none is truly theirs. They began this sojourn 6 years before when her father died suddenly of a too large heart.

Cora is a budding naturalist. She carefully documents all the plants and trees she finds in each of the places they live, keeping note in her father’s field journal which she calls her “Tree Book.” Through her observations and records, we are exposed to aspects of nature that I wouldn’t have known existed in these urban settings. Frankly, I had never heard of the Red Hook and Gowanus sections of Brooklyn, and I was fascinated reading about them from within Cora’s story.

We also see a panoply of different people through her eyes: a new friend who lives on a houseboat and was home schooled for most of her life; an artist building a giant, slightly jagged, heart in an old warehouse; an old friend of her mother’s who lives a life of relative luxury near by; and her sister, Adare, who is “special.” Cora hates that word because “when it comes to Adare, nobody can get enough of the word special.” Adare was deprived of oxygen as a baby and is certainly different, but there is more to Adare than the label implies — she has a magical way of interacting with the world.

This is a real gem — one of the best young reader books I’ve read in a long time. An honest and absorbing story about a young girl seeking to belong. As a fun aside, in the acknowledgements, I found out that Sarno’s agent is none other than Rebecca Stead, one of my favorite children’s literature authors. An excellent recommendation!

About Me

I’m a voracious reader and life-long patron of libraries and bookstores, living in a house of apocalyptic book spillage. Books are my entertainment, education, and exposure to the myriad forms of human experience. Retired from a high-tech career, I volunteer for the African Library Project, a nonprofit devoted to building libraries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Reading Quotes…

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. –Haruki Murakami

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it. –Edward P. Morgan

You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend. –Paul Sweeney

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” ― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” ― Groucho Marx

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” ― Erasmus

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” ― Groucho Marx

“I cannot live without books.” ― Thomas Jefferson

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” ― James Baldwin

“There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.” ― Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense

“The world was hers for the reading.” ― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“My library is an archive of longings.” ― Susan Sontag

“What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!” ― Thomas Babington Macaulay

“Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.” ― Nicholson Baker

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?” ― Cornelia Funke

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.” ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.” ― Anne Herbert

“Elend: I kind of lost track of time…
Breeze: For two hours?
Elend: There were books involved.” ― Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice